While escaping through space, the Mima, a machine with a defective A.I. system, is overtaken by a warship.
Severely damaged by its harpoons, the Mima uses what little strength it has left to break free, but is forced to crash on an unexplored planet, Apus 7.
Severely damaged by its harpoons, the Mima uses what little strength it has left to break free, but is forced to crash on an unexplored planet, Apus 7.
Space-junkers Vascan (Anders Heinrichsen), Lago (Christian Erickson) and their A.I. Tracey (voiced by Alexandra Flandrin) have hunted and shot down a mysterious biopunk ship named the Mima. When the ship births a mysterious entity (played by Joelle Berckmans), they are told to follow it to wherever it is headed and find themselves in a beautiful, yet surreal nightmare that they may be unable to awaken from.
Blood Machines is the Sci-Fi Horror film directed by Anders Heinrichsen, Elisa Lasowski and Joëlle Berckmans. Intended to be a sequel to the music video
of the Carpenter Brut song "Turbo Killer", Blood Machines was released in 2019 as a Shudder Original film in three-parts.
Tropes featured in this movie include:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: When Corey and the Entity corner and kill Vascan, Tracey turns on Lago, having been influenced into Turned Against Their Masters, before manifesting into a humanoid body similar to the Entity.
- Ambiguously Human: The ships' souls. They may be Human Aliens that are simply Energy Beings in the form of women, or they may be the souls of human women that have been captured and forced to act as ship's A.I.s.
- And I Must Scream: After Corey kills him, Vascan is later resurrected as a tiny component of the biomass that makes up the literal heart of a Giant Woman.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: While Lago believes that the birth of the woman from the Mima was a miracle and starts viewing things through a religious lens, Vascan scoffs at the idea, calling her a "parasite with pretty legs."
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Lago treats Tracey in a very kind manner, which is in sharp contrast to Vascan's abuse and outright rape of the AI. As a result, when Corey is enthralling Vascan and preparing to kill him, Tracey tries to keep Lago from helping him because she doesn't want him to get hurt. While he persists and ends up dying of a heart attack, Tracy is able to resurrect him as a soul similar to hers.
- Derelict Graveyard: The crew wind up following the Humanoid Abomination to a space-ship graveyard.
- Eldritch Starship:
- The Mima was implied to have been a living creature that was just a part of the crew as the voyagers that flew it. After it "dies", the crew enact a funerary ritual in its honor that causes an eclipse-like event that results in the birth of a god-like being.
- Vascan and Lago's ship shoots down Mima in the beginning is designed not unlike a monster. The deck's visors look like the eyes of an insect, the "arms" of the ship have feelers like a deep-sea creature and when its deck opens, it looks like the maw of a predator, including a set of viper-like fangs.
- At the end of the movie, the Derelict Graveyard all merge into a Giant Woman that Corey controls by dancing with a harem of entities.
- Fanservice: The entity that emerges from the Mima takes the form of a naked woman who stays naked throughout the entire film. When the crew follows her through hyperspace, we are treated to a very thorough scanning of her profile. Then in the end of the film, an entire legion of them emerge from the remains of a Derelict Graveyard and merge into one. Giant. Naked. Woman!
- Feminist Fantasy: One interpretation of the film can be seen as a Cosmic Horror spin on the idea. The Villain Protagonist Vascan is a Straw Misogynist who abuses his female-coded AI, brutalizes an all-female crew and captures and threatens to rape one of them. His captive would go on to kill him in a Honey Trap, takes control of his body through an invasive form of magic that can be construed as a rape metaphor, the AI he abused rebels and evolves into a Humanoid Abomination and the film ends with him becoming an unwilling passenger of a god-like entity that resembles a woman.
- Homage: The music and visuals were deliberately made as a throwback to Science Fiction and progressive rock from The '80s. The technology has an aged Zeerust quality one would find in Dune (1984) and the Alien franchise, lasers look like a lighting effect, all of the music is synth-based and the entire film has a grainy film quality that makes it look like it's being watched on a VHS tape.
- Humanoid Abomination: The woman that emerges from the wreckage of the Mima looks like a human woman, but it's skin takes on a purple, phosphorescent hue and has a glowing inverted cross on her stomach. Tracy, Vascan and Lago's AI, seems to think that it is the ship even when it emerges as a Human Alien. As it turns out, she would know.
- In Medias Res: The film starts after the Mima is shot down by a warship. The "why" comes after.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Vascan is a bounty hunter chasing after rogue A.I. starships. After one is revealed to contain an imprisoned entity, with the heavy implication that all starships contain a similarly enslaved entity, he continues his mission to recapture the escaped Energy Being, even as his superiors tell him not to. In the end, after he's been killed, his soul wakes up imprisoned in the very same manner in the heart of the new super entity.
- Machine Worship: The Human Aliens seem to worship the AI of their ship as a god, it emerging as a godlike being after its "death" leading a lot of credence to this idea. The fact that Tracey emerges with a body of her own implies that all A.I. are divine in some way.
- Mechanical Abomination: The Humanoid Abomination the crew encounter at the beginning is implied to be a form of Magitek AI the Human Aliens use to control their ships. The first entity first emerges from the "corpse" of the Mima. When Corey turns the Derelict Graveyard into an Eldritch Starship, she does this by manifesting a small legion of similar entities, apparently being the A.I. of the fallen ships made manifest. One even emerges from Tracey's mechanical body by the end.
- Our Witches Are Different: The Human Aliens that piloted the Mima are all female with stark red hair. When the Mima "dies", they enact a ritual that creates a giant sigil on the ground, makes the planets in the solar system align and results in the creation of a god-like woman from the Mima's "corpse."
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Mima has a "soul" of some kind that kept the ship functioning, and once it was destroyed said soul escaped in the form of a human woman. Later on, it's revealed that seemingly all starships, including Tracey, have a soul at their heart as well. And that's not even getting into the bizarre organic nature of the ships beyond this. By the end of the movie, Vascan is trapped in a very similar manner to the soul of the Mima, powering the new God-entity.
- Ray Gun: Vascan wields a truly bizarre energy weapon, a giant metal block that radiates intense heat and shoots out horizontal lances of plasma that don't follow a straight trajectory after a short distance. These shots somehow linger in the air for several seconds after being fired, and can even cause damage in this state, as one of the Mima's crew finds out.
- Rule of Symbolism: Tracey's mechanical body resembles a woman bound, gagged and restricted in a harness that evokes physical and sexual torture, showing how A.I. are mistreated as tools and beasts of burden by the men that use them. If Vascan's statement at one point can be taken at face value, she's even been designed to act as a Sex Bot. After she turns against Lago, she manifests as a nude, human body similar to all of the other entities, freed of her shackles.
- Running Gag: Whenever the crew lands on a new planet or area with an atmosphere, Vascan spontaneously vomits due to the methanethiol in the air.
- Shout-Out: Tracy's mechanical body gives her a startling resemblance to The Machine Man from Metropolis.
- Straw Misogynist: Vascan sees the female-coded AI of his ship with contempt, finds the idea of the Mima's all-female crew distasteful and kidnaps one of them while threatening to use her as a sex-slave. Even when he sees them perform actual magic, he continues to treat Corey with contempt. It's implied that the organization that built these ships is this way in general, as they apparently designed their ship's AI bodies to act as sex bots, modeled their flagship with a gigantic statue of a bound woman adorning the outer hull, and almost certainly knowingly began the process of enslaving the Ambiguously Human souls to power and run their starships.
- Surreal Horror: Who are the Human Aliens Vascan, Lago and Tracy encounter? Their employer wants the Mima, but we never find out why. What exactly is the entity that emerged from the Mima? Why did it travel to the Derelict Graveyard? It's clearly an important site to the Human Aliens, but why? What destroyed so many ships in that area? Was it the Human Aliens? A similar entity? What the hell is the ending?!
- Token Good Teammate: Lago is kind to Tracey and treats the crew of Mima as people rather than objects of contempt. He even tries to temper Vascan's overt threats of violence towards both Tracey and Corey. This is why Tracey tries to spare, and ultimately resurrects him in the finale.
- True Companions: For how awful of a person Vascan is otherwise, and how kind Lago is in contrast, it's notable that the two do seem to care for each others well being. Before venturing into the Derelict Graveyard, Vascan seems genuinely concerned for Lago's health, while Lago reassures him that he has a "heart of steel." When Vascan is being possessed, Lago tries mounting a rescue and for the only time in the film threatens Tracy when she won't let him leave.
- Used Future: Every piece of technology aboard Tracey is dirty, well used and hardly being kept together. Pieces of machinery have to be constantly worked with or around because they are failing, with even Vascan's Ray Gun barely managing to fire half the time.
- Visual Innuendo: The last shot shows the Giant Woman resting against the giant glowing Arc Symbol that resembles a flower. Open flowers are typically used as yonic symbols, meaning the image represents a form of rebirth.
